Government to increase installed power generation

Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta has said the government will increase the installed generation capacity by about 487MW through Cenpower (340MW), Early Power Phase 1 (147MW), this year to meet the growing demand for electricity.

Presenting the budget, he said the country’s installed generation capacity was increased from 4,132 MW in 2016 to 4,577MW in 2017, adding that under the Transmission System Improvement Projects, GRIDCo had been carrying out the Transmission System Reinforcement Project to improve operational reliability, security, and control, among others.

Key among these include the Kpando-Kadjebi 161kV Transmission Line, which has been completed; the Aboadze-Prestea and Prestea-Kumasi 330kV Transmission Lines, which are about 70 percent complete and billed to complete in 2018; and the Kumasi-Bolgatanga 330kV Transmission Line which is about 50 percent complete.

This year, he said, a total of 1,796 communities will be connected to the national grid.

“Under the Energy Efficiency and Conservation programme, the Ministry will distribute 12 million LED Lamps under a cost recovery programme. Street lights will be replaced with better efficiency lamps under the Regional Capitals Street Lighting Project.”

He also disclosed that under the Rural Electrification Programme, 289 out of a targeted 2,185 communities, were connected to the national grid, with other projects at various stages of completion.

To enhance development of a competitive power market, government approved the restructuring of Volta River Authority (VRA) to include an entity to manage the hydroelectric facilities separately and the sale to the private sector of the state-funded thermal power plants, which government assigned to VRA to manage and operate.

The restructuring of VRA is expected to enable the use of cheap electricity from legacy hydro to support government subsidy objectives to a targeted category of consumers in a transparent manner.

Furthermore, he said to align the ECG Private Sector Participation (PSP) Programme with the concerns raised, government secured key amendments to the ECG PSP arrangements.

“The concession period has been reduced from 25 to 20 years, and Ghanaian shareholding threshold was increased from 20 percent to 51 percent.”